In all these cases probably, the power of sustaining a protracted privation of water depends on a peculiar structure of the pharynx, which is divided by membranous plates into cells which the fish can fill at pleasure with water, and by ejecting small portions at a time can moisten its gills, and thus preserve the filaments of these organs in a fit condition to maintain the circulation and oxygenation of the blood. These labyrinthal water-chambers are particularly numerous and complicated in the _Anabas_ just mentioned. This, however, has no analogy with the lung of the _Lepidosiren_. [70] _Mag. Nat. Hist._, ii. 322. [71] From the _Times_ of Jan. 24, 1861. [72] The _Oscillatoria_ is a genus of _plants_; it is a microscopic _Alga_ of wire-like form belonging to the great Confervoid family, having the remarkable peculiarity of spontaneous and apparently voluntary motion. [73] Latrobe's _Alpenstock_, p. 12. [74] Seemann's _Isthmus of Panama_. [75] I am indebted for this note to the Rev. Leonard Jenyns. See his edition of White's _Selborne_, (1843) p. 66. [76] _Zoologist_, pp. 6541, 6564. [77] _Ceylon_, i. 211. [78] _Journ. Asiat. Soc. Bengal_, vi. 465. [79] _Brit. Fishes_, i. xxvii. Aristotle had long before given the same explanation. [80] _De Pisc. in siceo degent._ [81] _De Piscibus._ [82] _Siam_, i. 144. [83] _Emb. to Siam_, i. 10. [84] _Fishes of Guiana_, i. 113. [85] _Annals N. H._, _May 1853_. [86] Tennent's _Ceylon_, ii. 498. III. MERMAIDS. According to Berosus there came up from the Red Sea, on the shore contiguous to Babylonia, a brute creature named Oannes, which had the body of a fish, above whose front parts rose the head of a man; it had two human feet, which projected from each side of the tail; it had also a human voice and human language. This strange monster sojourned among the rude people during the day, taking no food, but retiring to the sea again at night; and continued for some time, teaching them the arts of civilised life. Other ancient authors, as Polyhistor and Apollodorus, allude to the same tradition; and we gather that the portrait of the learned stranger (not painted _from the life_, we may presume, considering the condition of the people when he appeared, unless we may suppose it to have been the effort of one of his pupils in the pictorial art under his instruction) was preserved at Babylon to the historic period. In an elaborate sculpture of the later Assyrian period, discovered by M. Botta at Khorsabad, a maritime expedition is portrayed, and the sea around the ships is filled with various marine animals, and among them the compound mythic forms of winged bulls and bull-lions, in which the Assyrians delighted, together with a figure composed of the body and tail of a fish extended horizontally, and the perpendicular trunk and foreparts of a man, crowned with the sacred cap, possibly representing the traditional Oannes.